Toeppen responds to claims about his suits, and banner complaint.

Update:This story now includes updates and corrections based upon responses from Suburban Express and attorney James Long.

In a repeat performance that would make even Barbara blush, Illinois bus company owner Dennis Toeppen is pushing the so-called Streisand Effect to its limits by again trying to get reddit to shut up about his company. Once notorious as a domain squatter, Toeppen more recently became notorious for his war with social media users who speak ill of his Suburban Express bus service.

Toeppen has now taken it up a notch, moving to revive legal threats and trolling his critics on reddit more ferociously. In this latest round, Toeppen's lawyer, James Long, and sent another legal threat to a redditor over a banner on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign subreddit.

The demand was not over the full statement on the banner, as was previously reported, but rather over the phrase "they're likely to sue." The banner on the UIUC subreddit—a discussion area for UIUC students and the community around the university— now reads, "Don't ride Suburban Express! They've sued hundreds of their customers, threatened the mods with legalaction, have terrible reviews, and more." The phrase "likely to sue" has been dropped.

"Simply put, Suburban Express has received a large amount of publicity regarding its actions in the past," Long wrote to redditor Murph Finnicum. "With the information that is available to the public at large based upon the same, any prospective customers have ample evidence to make their own determination as to whether or not they want to use Suburban Express. Your false claims regarding the likelihood of the lawsuit are clearly more than an attempt to 'educate' and 'protect' the public as you have claimed, and Suburban Express requests that you remove this claim from Reddit within seven days."

Further antagonizing reddit readers, in what Toeppen said was a message to a specific person posted yesterday on the company's website, he put the following message on the home page: "Welcome, paranoid Reddit users! Got your IP address and referring URL!".

Enlarge/ The Suburban Express website welcomes you, reddit users, with the warmth of an NSA wiretap.

The story so far

Back in April, Finnicum was the target of another legal threat from Long and Toeppen for "allowing false and libelous" comments to be posted about Toeppen's company on reddit. Ken White, the defense lawyer behind the legal blog Popehat, offered pro-bono legal assistance to Finnicum.

Toeppen had filed more than 100 lawsuits in small claims court against customers this year alone. Most of Toeppen's targets were or are University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign students, and the suits were filed in an adjoining county where UIUC's student legal services doesn't provide assistance. Some of these suits were over disputed payments and included "liquidated damages" claims against passengers for violating the company's terms of service.

"I believe that only three lawsuits had anything to do with the liquidated damages clause," Toeppen said in an email to Ars. "About 20-30 were for duplicate/altered/counterfeit tickets. In reality, most are dishonored payments, some are TOS, and three are liquidated damages."

The ToS states that all tickets are nonrefundable and specific to a bus run, and places steep "ticket fraud" fines on riders who present the wrong ticket for the leg of a round-trip. Some reddit users have claimed they've been banned from the company's buses after negative comments on social media. In at least one case, Suburban Express sued a passenger who spoke ill of the company—after a Facebook post from passenger Jeremy Leval, who complained about the rude treatment of a fellow passenger, Toeppen filed suit against him for liquidated damages.

"Leval's problems did not arise because of his online activities," Toeppen told Ars. "His problems are due to what we would characterize as disruptive behavior on a bus. We believe that his posts on social media support our claim of disruptive behavior. We have not pursued him because he posted trash on Facebook. His Facebook activity is merely evidence which supports our position."

The case attracted the attention of angry reddit users, the media (including First Amendment law blog Popehat), and (according to a report from The Daily Illini) the Illinois Attorney General's office. Shortly after Ken White contacted Long over the matter, the initial letter to Finnicum was rescinded. Long also requested in court that most of the lawsuits filed by Suburban Express in Ford County be dismissed. The Ford County court dismissed many of them with prejudice—meaning that the cases could not be re-filed.

"As for the AG's office, their response is best characterized as lip service," Toeppen said to Ars. "We haven't been contacted, other than a couple complaints that went through their standard workflow."

Still, Toeppen continued to wage an Internet war against Leval, posting a derogatory rant about him on the company's website. In May, he filed Freedom of Information Act requests with UIUC about Leval, Finnicum, and an employee of the university's Office of Public Affairs. Through another attorney, Suburban Express filed to appeal the status of 22 of the lawsuits that had been dismissed in order to potentially re-file; Toeppen told the Paxton Record that these cases would not be re-filed in Ford County. "I imagine that most/all of our new cases will be filed in Champaign County, so that any students we pursue have access to Student Legal Services and can feel that they have a reasonable opportunity to defend their fraudulent activities,” he said.

Toeppen has also allegedly continued to troll reddit under "throw-away" accounts. redditors claim that Toeppen has posted that the FOIA requests were an effort to "dox" the Office of Public Affairs employee and prove he was a reddit user. "Reddit users claim that I have created something like 110 accounts," Toeppen told Ars."That accusation is false. Everything in there is smoke and mirrors. There are people actively pretending to be me pretending not to be me. It's quite comical."

131 Reader Comments

To further antagonize the Internet, Toeppen now brags on his own website that he's recording the IP addresses of site visitors who come from reddit as part of his effort to intimidate social media commenters. "Welcome, paranoid Reddit users! Got your IP address and referring URL!" his company's home page proclaims.

Well, I know this is exactly the kind of thing that makes me think a company is completely professional and above-board.

Oh no! They got someone's IP address! Whatever will they do with such DASTARDLY information?

The usual people like this do: say some 80-year old grandma was making the post and extort a few hundred bucks out of her. You know, the same reason these people shame everyone around them when they do these things.

How does this guy not qualify as a vexatious litigant? Filing the suits in a way to be financially burdensome to students, instituting rules about ticket folding that are seemingly designed to be broken, levying outrageous 'fines' for complaining about service- this guy shouldn't be allowed to sue anybody.

I wonder what it would take for this guy to get his merchant account taken away ? The company having credit card info and charging fines, etc to it is galling, but I would love to see this guy operate his business as a cash-only operation.... and then tell all the criminals in the state where all the stops are where these buses will have drivers carrying all the cash.

The trouble with his business model is that you can't just charge credit cards like he does and if the charges are challenged they'll be reversed. Too many reversals and the card processors start investigating WHY that's occurring and let's just say that can get really nasty.

I don't how it works, but i am sure that a very bad customer service , an awful and abusive treatment to the users should lead this bus company to bankruptcy.

This would be the case, but you've got to keep in mind that they're targeting students. Meaning that even as the market wises up to the ridiculously bad service, you still get a large influx of new customers every year whose last concern is getting fucked by a bus company for folding a ticket the wrong way.

The fact that the university proper permits recommendations of Suburban Express on its network is something that should get it more shame than this lawsuit-flinging twat, as far as I'm concerned. They'd get sued for explicitly telling people not to use Suburban Express, but they could withstand such an attack far better than a student facing the cost of a modern education.

Sean Gallagher / Sean is Ars Technica's IT Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.